I’m getting confused with Windows 7 experience index; because on one of my home computers with 2 hard disks 7200 rpm configured with RAID 0 I got 5.9 as score on “ Disk data transfer rate “, while on another computer which had only one hard disk 7200 rpm got also 5.9 as score on “ disk data transfer rate “.

5 Answers
5

While there is a slight performance increase in RAID-0 for home users, it is not as drastic as many would have you believe. RAID-0 was designed with a multi-user server scenario in mind with multiple random reads and writes at once. Many of the RAID benchmarks are using this scenario, and not a single-user scenario that accurately represents home users. This doesn't explain why they are identical in the Windows benchmark, but in reality, the performance is relatively close.

I think it's important to add that random reads/writes must be <= the stripe size for RAID 0 drives to be able to operate independently - and for there to be any benefit to the random read/write performance (compared to a single drive). So this will probably tend to be the case for a server performing many small database queries/updates.
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sblairAug 15 '10 at 22:18

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As seek speed is not increased with RAID-0, it is sustained throughput which benefits from it, like when reading very large continuous files - eg. video editing.
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paradroidNov 8 '10 at 20:27

The Windows Experience Index is a simple metric to indicate performance. Sure, you will have decent read performance under RAID 0, but write performance will be less than more high-end drive. Clearly you'd expect RAID 0 to measure slightly better, but this is only a crude metric.

My Samsung F3s get 5.9 under AHCI, and 5.9 under RAID. Another machine with 15,000 rpm SAS drives only get 6.3.

I don't think there's a way to statically improve HD performance in WEI. I had a 320GB 7200RPM in my laptop with a 5.7 rating. I switched to a 128GB SSD and the rating jumped to 7.1 (the total rate remained the same, since it's dictated by the lowest score).